Activists say man who defended wife wrongly charged with murder

By St. John Barned-Smith, Anita Hassan |
September 4, 2014
| Updated: September 5, 2014 10:49am

Dana McDonald, right, and his wife, Cassandra Dallas McDonald, found out he ﻿will be charged with the murder of a man who was allegedly robbing his tractor-trailer﻿.

Photo By Gary Coronado/Staff

Minister Quanell X, left, of the New Black Panthers, ﻿spoke out in defense of Dana McDonald, right. "Mr. McDonald has been charged, in my opinion, to send a message that you don't kill white people," he said.

Two years ago, Dana K. McDonald walked up to his tractor-trailer in northeast Harris County when he found two men in his truck.

One fled, but the second man attacked McDonald and his wife with a metal trucking tool called a "cheater bar."

McDonald grabbed the bar and attacked the alleged burglar, Frankie Ballard, who died in the hospital later that night from injuries he suffered in the fight.

Authorities initially said they weren't planning to press charges, but in April 2013, McDonald and his family learned he had been indicted by a Harris County grand jury. The charge: murder.

As McDonald prepares for trial later this month, critics of the district attorney's office say he is being treated unfairly because he is black, and that a white man in a similar situation would not have been indicted.

"This man should be applauded for protecting his wife and not indicted for murder," said community activist Quanell X, discussing McDonald's case at a news conference Thursday. "Mr. McDonald has been charged, in my opinion, to send a message that you don't kill white people under any circumstances in Harris County."

He called for charges against McDonald to be dropped.

The activist compared McDonald's situation to the highly publicized case in 2007 of Joe Horn, a white man who shot and killed two Latino men who came into his yard after burglarizing his neighbor's house in Pasadena. Dispatchers told Horn not to approach or try to stop them. Prosecutors presented the case to a grand jurors, who declined to indict Horn.

Presented to grand jury

As is their policy with similar incidents, prosecutors presented the case to a grand jury, said District Attorney spokesman Jeff McShan.

"Any time there is a shooting between two parties and something like that happens, it goes to a grand jury - every time," McShan said. "We let 12 members of our community decide whether there is probable cause to charge a person with a crime in those cases."

McShan would not say whether prosecutors had recommended charges to the grand jury.

In a previous court appearance, prosecutors said that McDonald had told police he chased Ballard away from his tractor trailer, and during the chase, the man turned around and threw the cheater bar at him, but missed.

McDonald picked it up and threw the pipe at him, striking him in the back and causing him to fall, prosecutors said, adding that McDonald told police that he held Ballard down and struck him repeatedly in the face and the head but didn't use the pipe.

A person who was driving by, meanwhile, called 911 and said he saw a man beating another man with an object, perhaps a golf club.

Kurt Wentz, McDonald's court-appointed attorney, said he already had asked the district attorney's office to drop its case against McDonald.

"I thought that it was a perfect case of self-defense," he said, explaining McDonald had believed he might lose his life or his livelihood. McDonald would be pleading not guilty, he said.

While noting that the level of proof necessary for an indictment is far lower than what is necessary for a conviction, legal experts said the grand jury's decision to indict McDonald surprised them.

Tamara Lave, a former public defender who has studied Stand Your Ground laws across the nation as well as the Joe Horn case and who now teaches law at the University of Miami, said the case against McDonald as it's been presented thus far seemed "dubious."

"It would be astonishing that in any state, but (especially) in Texas - indicting anyone for murder on those facts would be astonishing under a self-defense law," she said.

Pursuit complicated

Geoffrey Corn, a professor at the South Texas College of Law, said McDonald would have had a right to use force after initially being attacked, but that using force following a chase could be questionable.

"The complicating issue here is pursuing this guy and then attacking him," Corn said. "Because at that point, you could argue, his use of force was no longer necessary."

McDonald is free on $100,000 bail. At Thursday's news conference, the 48-year-old man said the fight started after Ballard hit him with the "cheater bar."

"Some kind of way I wrassled the pipe away from him, and I used it on him, striking him a couple of times, maybe two, three times at the most," he said.

Harris County Sheriff's Office dispatchers received a call around 10:21 p.m. from McDonald's wife, stating that two men had broken into her husband's 18-wheeler, said spokesman deputy Thomas Gilliland.

She told them her husband had caught one of the men, but the other had fled. While deputies were on their way to the scene, the two men got into an altercation, Gilliland said.

When the deputies arrived, they called paramedics, who took Ballard to Memorial Hermann Hospital. He died about an hour later, Gilliland said.